Which Pieces of Automotive History Would You Teach?

I have been an automotive instructor for 24 years, and recently the college I teach at approached me to teach a course on the "history of the automobile in America." Understand, I've always taught the vocational side of cars (auto-body repair) and maintenance courses for beginners, but this course intrigues me. The good news is that the topic is HUGE, with almost 2 billion sites and pages on the internet. The bad news is that the topic is HUGE, with almost 2 billion sites and pages on the internet! How would you lecture on a topic this big, covering it in about six to eight talks? By the way, I love your column. -- Russ

Great question, Russ.

As you might guess, there are 2 billion ways to approach this topic. So I'll just give you one way you could potentially organize the lectures.

Your first lecture or two could be about automotive technology. Keep in mind that the most interesting stuff happened in the early days of cars and in the past 30 or 40 years. Early on, you had the internal-combustion engine, the production assembly line, hydraulic brakes and the automatic transmission. And then there was a long period of time with very little meaningful innovation. Then in the past few decades, spurred by the EPA and by higher gas prices, computerization and fuel injection have transformed fuel economy, emissions and reliability.

From there you can lecture on safety innovations over the years, which also have been revolutionized by computers. Tucker and Volvo had some early safety advances, which were mostly ignored. Then, in the 1960s, Ralph Nader started complaining about all the people getting killed in cars. That started a push for some amazing safety improvements, from mandatory 3-point seat belts to crumple zones, air bags, ABS, electronic stability control and, most recently, today's pre-autonomous driving technologies.

Another lecture could be on our most popular cars. You could spend one session on big hits: the Model A, the late-'50s Chevy sedans, the Mustang, the VW Bug, the Honda Civic, the Toyota Camry. You can try to figure out why (styling? design? competitive advantages?) those cars were so popular -- and why some, like the '60s Mustangs, are still popular, even though they're horrible cars when compared with even a modern-day Kia Rio.

You also could lecture on big flops, like the Edsel, the Pacer and the Aztek. You could talk about what the manufacturers thought they were improving, and why they turned out to be wrong.

And then your last lecture could be a look to the future, with fully autonomous cars and vehicle-to-vehicle communication to prevent accidents.

And by the way, Russ, if all that autonomous driving stuff works, it could put you auto-body guys out of business. So it's good you're branching out into academia.